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Friday, October 15, 2010

Held, four years later

In the past, I have sat alone and pondered the emptiness and loss with aching arms and a grieving soul. With shaky hands, I scrolled the archives of my blog until I found this post, which I read solemnly, quietly, waiting for more tears to come.

This year, there were tears, too-- but they were the tears of someone who has been given eyes to see. As I thought about the years of fruitlessness, I pressed my newborn daughter to my breast and breathed in the scent of her sweet baby head. Not my will, God ... but yours.

Nothing can take back the pain I have felt. No one--not even my beautiful little Seven-- can replace the little ones I never got to hold. But it's true: time, growth, and new blessings can ease some of the hurt.

I still remember. I still mourn. But I do so with new hope. I am, after all, still being held.

Thank you so much for sharing! I think that this issue needs to be raised in the church far more often than it does. For all our church-talk about believing that life begins at conception we do a *very* poor job at recognizing that those who suffer a miscarriage have lost an actual child. Their grief needs to be respected and honoured.

While I’m not a Catholic, at least they have a special ceremony for parents who have lost their child through miscarriage. We, on the other hand, tend to look the other way and pretend that nothing happened. I think it is time that we put our actions back in line with our beliefs and start showing a lot more care and concern for these grieving and hurting families.